As Amazon grew from an online bookstore to an “everything” store, it built up an immense electronic infrastructure, including storage and databases. The company realized that its infrastructure wasn’t simply an internal resource. It could also be sold to other companies as a cloud-computing service, to be used for storage, networking, and databases. AWS eventually became a cash cow for Amazon, generating roughly $17 billion in revenue in 2017—more than Amazon’s retail division.42
